11 ms·

The food we buy is shrinking (2018)

26 points by polymorph1sm 6y ago

hombre_fatal 6y ago
To be cheeky, I didn't see any real food in the picture nor the article. My fruit and vegetables aren't getting any smaller. Frankly, given the problems with health, diet, and obesity in most of the world, anything that makes more nutritional food compete easier with packaged food seems like a good thing. Like "packaged food is ripping us off" would be an excellent meme if it took any real hold. We're dying. I watched a video that compared the food we have in our convenience stores to what they have in Japan (fresh soups, vegetables, fish) and it really opened my eyes about how our lives/health could be, and how effortless healthy choices could be. Until then, the only thing perishable at my local 7/11 is a mealy saran wrapped apple and it has to somehow compete with all the tastier packaged food.
- war1025 6y ago
  > My fruit and vegetables aren't getting any smaller. On the plus side, if they are, they usually sell by the pound.
  - pengaru 6y ago
    Many fruits and vegetables have a waste component that nobody eats, but is necessary for the things to grow. Think banana/orange peels, carrot tops, or the vegetable placenta of a bell pepper. If you pay by unit weight for those things, and they're getting smaller, you're getting less of the edible component but still plenty of the wasted bits. You can think of it as relatively constant packaging overhead. I can't say I've noticed any of my organic produce getting smaller though.
    - svieira 6y ago
      Banana peels and bell pepper placenta compost, orange peels can be candied and zested, and carrot tops go into the pot for vegetable broth and _then_ are composted. There's a lot to reduce / reuse / reanimate [1] in your fresh produce's "packaging". [1]: https://logo.cafepress.com/5/1221917.6258105.jpg https://logo.cafepress.com/5/1221917.6258105.jpg (Order of the Stick)
      - pengaru 6y ago
        Which is all fine and dandy, but an entirely moot point - that's a constant consolation prize largely independent of the size. We're not talking about fresh produce vs. other packaged foods, it's fresh produce vs. shrunken fresh produce.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  While skimming the article I realized that fortunately I'm not buying any of these "foods". Moreover, in my country the law requires specifying the price per unit using common unit for all products, and I often make use of this information.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  > To be cheeky You should have spent a little bit more time reading the article than the admittedly poor headline. The article isn't about making "more nutritional food compete easier with packaged food", it's about how packaged /products/ (not just food) are stealthily shrinking as prices remain fixed so as to slowly increase effective unit price to the end consumer. That is the point of the article, and your comment has nothing to do with it.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    I did read the article. It's solely concerned with packaged food. Boxes of Cocoa Puffs and other crap are getting smaller. You confused an opinion I introduced in my comment as a summary of the article. I'm claiming that there's a silver lining in packaged food getting smaller. I don't think there's much interesting discussion about the article itself. "Hey, yeah, I did notice my Ovaltine canisters getting smaller." So brace yourself for more people making higher level commentary than that.
    - yowlingcat 6y ago
      > It's solely concerned with packaged food. No, it's not. Toilet paper is one of the main examples that is used in the article along with food. This is exactly my point. You clearly didn't read the article closely enough to understand the point it's trying to make.
      - hombre_fatal 6y ago
        I just went back and looked to see if I missed some after-the-ad section. After re-reading the article, I think it's pretty dishonest to assert that I'm missing its point. That it mentions some things beyond food didn't distract me from the things (the bulk of the article) it does say about food. Its only two charts are about food. This useless exchange must be why the charge of "u didn't read the article" is discouraged in HN's guidelines. In your quest to unmask me as a filthy article-dodger, you also didn't contribute to the discussion beyond mentioning that in an article chiefly about food, some other packaged goods were brought up. And presumably it was a grave error on my part to only talk about the main charge of the article -- which is the only part I had something to say about -- and not the whole domain of implications -- which I have nothing to say about.
- hderms 6y ago
  The situation with Japan is likely a bit different given the extremely high population densities and the sheer number of convenience stores (and consequently, the high turnover they likely experience). Additionally, they have consumers who are used to buying food like that at convenience stores which doesn't seem to be the case with Americans. The price points of fresh food in American convenience stores are much worse, leading to a self fulfilling prophesy where people are less likely to try convenience store food, making it hard to ever reach the economies of scale required to make the price reduction possible that would make it pervasive in American life
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - wolco 6y ago
    I have a local convience store that has fresh foods and some canned goods. It's the chain convience stores that don't carry anything.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Absolutely there are cultural issues at play, not just the 7/11 overlords trying to make us sick. Certainly snapping my fingers and forcing US convenience stores to sell cucumbers would just drive stores out of business. To me it's more a point about what could be possible once we wake up from our great nap. That we aren't damned to donuts in our convenience stores at the species level, just a cultural one, thus it can change for the better (hard to image it getting worse).
- maccard 6y ago
  My fruit and veg us definitely smaller. We've started ordering from a local supplier, and the onions, carrots, celery, Aubergines, garlic, and herbs are all probably 30% bigger, smell better and taste better too
_eht 6y ago
Here's an idea, stop constantly feeding yourself from companies who enjoy playing psychological pricing and ingredient/filler games on massive scales. Chances are you have someone in your town who roasts coffee beans. Chances are there are local eggs you could be getting easy, or with a little more effort, harvesting your own. Stop feeding yourself and your offspring insanely high levels of sugar breakfast cereal. Have you realized that they skirt food definitions around you? When was the last time you bought real dairy iced cream? Why are we chlorinating chicken and pumping it full of saline solution for the shelves, again? This article is frustrating because the onus is not directly on the manufacturing... consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition. But who can blame them, we have entire governments building pyramids to suit questionably beneficial food industries. Where does all that corn come from for our addiction to high fructose corn syrup? Stop letting people and companies who do not care about YOU, feed you and your family.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  Yup, this is the real solution. It's not easy, but it's the truth. So long as we allow supply chains to be centralized and verticalized, we introduce not just more middleman links to allow for adulteration, but more incentives for the middlemen to do so. People seem to forget that the adulteration involved in lowering prices has second order effects that can very much be unknown. Just a century ago, custom cough syrup tonics containing cocaine and heroin were considered completely safe. Even beyond the adulterants we know to be harmful, how many others which are currently GRAS will in the future be looked at as tragedies? Hopefully, few. But if not... I think the solution to this problem is to increase supply chain locality, as you said. It would be great to have more solutions that directly connected buyers to local farms. Another option I've thought about is building infrastructure around making it possible for folks to run microfarms inside their own homes -- if this could be done in a convenient way, it would be the 100% ideal solution, but short of that, I think reforming the current system to be local farm -> consumer is still closer to 99% ideal.
- perl4ever 6y ago
stuart78 6y ago
This theme always reminds me of the story Joel Spolsky related about optimizing the number of sesame seeds on a burger bun [0]. It may work for a while, but there is a logical lower limit to how small an ice cream container can be before it becomes a pint (e.g. pint plus 1/32 oz?). But that is always the next guy's problem, I suppose. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/11/theres-no-place-like-127001/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/11/theres-no-place-li...
- convolvatron 6y ago
  you've struck upon an excellent idea. if we just make the units even less sensible then they are now, then no one will be even tempted to do the arithmetic
- fmajid 6y ago
  Well, I stopped buying Haagen-Dazs when their tubs shrank and stuck to Ben & Jerry instead. And I stopped buying Tropicana Orange Juice when they shrank their juice containers from 64 fl. oz. to 59. You can't fool all of the people all the time.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  I see that as a story about how subjective comparisons are non-transitive, i.e. x > y > z > x.
diego_moita 6y ago
I make my own yogurt, my own ice-cream and maintain a wild-yeast culture for making sourdough. I roast my coffee in a popcorn popper for espresso. I make my own cookies, cakes, spice mixes, jam from raspberries on the back-yard and even some cleaning products. Sometimes I churn my butter. But, still, found this article disturbing. I can't make my own toilet paper, milk or cream (for the ice-cream). We need some more creative destruction on the economy.
chrisseaton 6y ago
I don't understand what the problem is. Either the value makes sense to you at the point of purchase or it doesn't. What does it matter to anyone what it used to cost yesterday? This isn't yesterday and you aren't being offered the product at yesterday's price, so forget about what happened yesterday. Take the current price or leave it. The article talks about 'sneakiness'. I don't get it. Are they lying about the volume or weight of the product? No? So what on earth is the problem? Sometimes prices go up, sometimes they go down. It's not some secret conspiracy. Prices fluctuate, world markets and supply conditions change, labour prices change. Does he think it's the job of a manufacturer of ice cream to protect him from the sands of time? And for some of the examples in the article... do people really need larger servings of 'fruit loops' of all things? Come on.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  > I don't understand what the problem is. Is it that you don't understand what the problem is, or that it makes you uncomfortable to look at the problem? Let me phrase a few questions that help me think about what I think the problem is in a few ways: - Do you think it's necessary or unnecessary for American regulations on advertising to exist? - Do you think it ought to be punished for products to be packaged in a deceptive manner as long as it's theoretically possible to see the base information to make a determination about the product? - Do you think that manufacturers that sell high purity goods can survive against those that diluted purity goods loaded with adulterants while concealing that and winning marketshare on volume?
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    I agree with advertising regulations. I don't think any situation described in this article is deceptive. I think it's up to the consumer to pick purity that meets their needs. I'm not really sure how pure 'fruit loops' can be though so I'm not sure that's relevant here. In summary, there's no moral issue here. The price by weight or volume of every product is accessible to the consumer, and they can judge the quality of the product on their own. And anyway a half gallon of ice cream is an absolutely obscene quantity, and it's a good thing producers are packaging things in more reasonable sizes.
racecar789 6y ago
Given enough time, customers will eventually exit the market. Ex: I have completely stopped buying processed cereal (Cheerios etc) in favor of natural oatmeal. I have a 40lb bag of oatmeal at home that will last 4 months. Also much healthier. When I see tiny cereal boxes on a store shelf...I shake my head.
dariosalvi78 6y ago
I never read the price per unit, I always read the price per liter, kg etc. and use that to compare products.
- thomasahle 6y ago
  That's good, and those should be made very visible by law. However if a product you regularly buy suddently shrinks very slightly, you might not notice, since you are no longer comparing it to other things.
- tpmx 6y ago
  I do the same. I'm in Sweden. There's old school pre-EU-legislation for price labels to have show a comparison price like that here. I've always assumed this came out of the consumer-empowerment-movement in the 70s, here. Is there a similar thing in the rest of the EU? Perhaps this is left to the member countries?
prpl 6y ago
The ultimate example of this is dollar stores like Dollar General.
- thomasahle 6y ago
  I feel like it's pretty fair in thst case. By definition they can't raise prices, so how else are they to keep up with inflation?
noir_lord 6y ago
When I lived alone I ate a lot of convenience food and pre-made sauces and such, then I moved in with my partner and she cooks everything from scratch (she's same age as me and Hungarian so she grew up under communism-lite where having your own animals and veg/fruit gardens was common if you lived in the country). Honestly I'd forgotten how good basic food tastes when it's cooked fresh - she makes simple things like mashed potato amazing and she bakes a lot as well - she wastes no food, left-overs are used up as lunch or frozen. The really stupid part of all this from my point of view was that our combined food bill from raw ingredients is about the same as what I was paying living alone.
- carapace 6y ago
  My sister got a whole chicken from the butcher and roasted it. I tasted a bit and went into a fugue, when I came to I found I had made a chicken sandwich! I used to think I didn't like chicken but it turns out I'd just never tasted it before.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    My partner can get 3 meals for 3 of us out of a single chicken. She also buys the 'cheaper' parts like Chicken thighs and then slow cooks them to utter perfection, with a few herbs and veggies it is sublime. I honestly though since I 'cooked' I was been economical but things like spaghetti bolognaise jars of sauce added 30% to the cost of a meal compared to the way she does it.
    - carapace 6y ago
      Riiiiight? It's cheaper and tastier and I'm sure it's healthier. > She also buys the 'cheaper' parts like Chicken thighs and then slow cooks them to utter perfection, with a few herbs and veggies it is sublime. That sounds so good. :-)
carapace 6y ago
I still remember when 12 oz cans became 11.5 oz cans.
flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago
My favorite example of this in Canada is a brand of butter that is shaped/looks exactly like a standard pound of butter when it sits on the shelf... but when you pick it up it's actually half a pound of butter... as it's only half as thick as you would expect it to be. It's usually priced higher than your average stick of butter as well. I picked one up once, laughed, and have actively avoided looking at that brand ever since. It's been on the shelf for years now though so they must be making good money?
crocodiletears 6y ago
I wonder if this shrinkage skews cost of living indices to any relevant degree. Changes to individual products may not amount to much money lost, but I could see them adding up in a non-trivial way that flies under the radar for most researchers.
Brian_K_White 6y ago
I always thought cake pops were the ultimate expression of this idea about the smaller dessert. Here is a single bite of cake. (They sell them at Starbucks, I don't know how much of a thing they are anywhere else. Actually I just realized I see the same idea in several restaurants with fancy little desserys in shot glasses. Still $6.50 for that one or two bites though.
pengaru 6y ago
This isn't a remotely recent phenomena. Back in the 90s when I was studying computer graphics I checked out a textbook on statistics and data visualization from the local library. I don't remember the year it was published, but it was one of those old hardcover books with browning coarse paper pages and a dark linen lining on the exterior. It was full of real world, hand-drawn visualizations, and one of the economic examples plotted Hersheys chocolate bar size per year across over a decade, with some other economic factor, GDP or some such. The text went a bit off on a tangent describing how the price of the bar stayed relatively constant but its volume varied in lockstep with the economy. I doubt you could use the Hersheys bar today as an economic barometer since we have so much variety on the store shelves. Back then there was just one Hersheys bar... but they seem to have always manipulated its size over its price.
lazylizard 6y ago
And yet my bmi keeps going up...perhaps they need to downsize some more...

26 points by polymorph1sm 6y ago

To be cheeky, I didn't see any real food in the picture nor the article. My fruit and vegetables aren't getting any smaller. Frankly, given the problems with health, diet, and obesity in most of the world, anything that makes more nutritional food compete easier with packaged food seems like a good thing. Like "packaged food is ripping us off" would be an excellent meme if it took any real hold. We're dying. I watched a video that compared the food we have in our convenience stores to what they have in Japan (fresh soups, vegetables, fish) and it really opened my eyes about how our lives/health could be, and how effortless healthy choices could be. Until then, the only thing perishable at my local 7/11 is a mealy saran wrapped apple and it has to somehow compete with all the tastier packaged food.

war1025 6y ago
> My fruit and vegetables aren't getting any smaller. On the plus side, if they are, they usually sell by the pound.
- pengaru 6y ago
  Many fruits and vegetables have a waste component that nobody eats, but is necessary for the things to grow. Think banana/orange peels, carrot tops, or the vegetable placenta of a bell pepper. If you pay by unit weight for those things, and they're getting smaller, you're getting less of the edible component but still plenty of the wasted bits. You can think of it as relatively constant packaging overhead. I can't say I've noticed any of my organic produce getting smaller though.
  - svieira 6y ago
    Banana peels and bell pepper placenta compost, orange peels can be candied and zested, and carrot tops go into the pot for vegetable broth and _then_ are composted. There's a lot to reduce / reuse / reanimate [1] in your fresh produce's "packaging". [1]: https://logo.cafepress.com/5/1221917.6258105.jpg https://logo.cafepress.com/5/1221917.6258105.jpg (Order of the Stick)
    - pengaru 6y ago
      Which is all fine and dandy, but an entirely moot point - that's a constant consolation prize largely independent of the size. We're not talking about fresh produce vs. other packaged foods, it's fresh produce vs. shrunken fresh produce.
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
While skimming the article I realized that fortunately I'm not buying any of these "foods". Moreover, in my country the law requires specifying the price per unit using common unit for all products, and I often make use of this information.
yowlingcat 6y ago
> To be cheeky You should have spent a little bit more time reading the article than the admittedly poor headline. The article isn't about making "more nutritional food compete easier with packaged food", it's about how packaged /products/ (not just food) are stealthily shrinking as prices remain fixed so as to slowly increase effective unit price to the end consumer. That is the point of the article, and your comment has nothing to do with it.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  I did read the article. It's solely concerned with packaged food. Boxes of Cocoa Puffs and other crap are getting smaller. You confused an opinion I introduced in my comment as a summary of the article. I'm claiming that there's a silver lining in packaged food getting smaller. I don't think there's much interesting discussion about the article itself. "Hey, yeah, I did notice my Ovaltine canisters getting smaller." So brace yourself for more people making higher level commentary than that.
  - yowlingcat 6y ago
    > It's solely concerned with packaged food. No, it's not. Toilet paper is one of the main examples that is used in the article along with food. This is exactly my point. You clearly didn't read the article closely enough to understand the point it's trying to make.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      I just went back and looked to see if I missed some after-the-ad section. After re-reading the article, I think it's pretty dishonest to assert that I'm missing its point. That it mentions some things beyond food didn't distract me from the things (the bulk of the article) it does say about food. Its only two charts are about food. This useless exchange must be why the charge of "u didn't read the article" is discouraged in HN's guidelines. In your quest to unmask me as a filthy article-dodger, you also didn't contribute to the discussion beyond mentioning that in an article chiefly about food, some other packaged goods were brought up. And presumably it was a grave error on my part to only talk about the main charge of the article -- which is the only part I had something to say about -- and not the whole domain of implications -- which I have nothing to say about.
hderms 6y ago
The situation with Japan is likely a bit different given the extremely high population densities and the sheer number of convenience stores (and consequently, the high turnover they likely experience). Additionally, they have consumers who are used to buying food like that at convenience stores which doesn't seem to be the case with Americans. The price points of fresh food in American convenience stores are much worse, leading to a self fulfilling prophesy where people are less likely to try convenience store food, making it hard to ever reach the economies of scale required to make the price reduction possible that would make it pervasive in American life
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wolco 6y ago
  I have a local convience store that has fresh foods and some canned goods. It's the chain convience stores that don't carry anything.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Absolutely there are cultural issues at play, not just the 7/11 overlords trying to make us sick. Certainly snapping my fingers and forcing US convenience stores to sell cucumbers would just drive stores out of business. To me it's more a point about what could be possible once we wake up from our great nap. That we aren't damned to donuts in our convenience stores at the species level, just a cultural one, thus it can change for the better (hard to image it getting worse).
maccard 6y ago
My fruit and veg us definitely smaller. We've started ordering from a local supplier, and the onions, carrots, celery, Aubergines, garlic, and herbs are all probably 30% bigger, smell better and taste better too

_eht 6y ago

Here's an idea, stop constantly feeding yourself from companies who enjoy playing psychological pricing and ingredient/filler games on massive scales. Chances are you have someone in your town who roasts coffee beans. Chances are there are local eggs you could be getting easy, or with a little more effort, harvesting your own. Stop feeding yourself and your offspring insanely high levels of sugar breakfast cereal. Have you realized that they skirt food definitions around you? When was the last time you bought real dairy iced cream? Why are we chlorinating chicken and pumping it full of saline solution for the shelves, again? This article is frustrating because the onus is not directly on the manufacturing... consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition. But who can blame them, we have entire governments building pyramids to suit questionably beneficial food industries. Where does all that corn come from for our addiction to high fructose corn syrup? Stop letting people and companies who do not care about YOU, feed you and your family.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yowlingcat 6y ago
Yup, this is the real solution. It's not easy, but it's the truth. So long as we allow supply chains to be centralized and verticalized, we introduce not just more middleman links to allow for adulteration, but more incentives for the middlemen to do so. People seem to forget that the adulteration involved in lowering prices has second order effects that can very much be unknown. Just a century ago, custom cough syrup tonics containing cocaine and heroin were considered completely safe. Even beyond the adulterants we know to be harmful, how many others which are currently GRAS will in the future be looked at as tragedies? Hopefully, few. But if not... I think the solution to this problem is to increase supply chain locality, as you said. It would be great to have more solutions that directly connected buyers to local farms. Another option I've thought about is building infrastructure around making it possible for folks to run microfarms inside their own homes -- if this could be done in a convenient way, it would be the 100% ideal solution, but short of that, I think reforming the current system to be local farm -> consumer is still closer to 99% ideal.
perl4ever 6y ago

stuart78 6y ago

This theme always reminds me of the story Joel Spolsky related about optimizing the number of sesame seeds on a burger bun [0]. It may work for a while, but there is a logical lower limit to how small an ice cream container can be before it becomes a pint (e.g. pint plus 1/32 oz?). But that is always the next guy's problem, I suppose. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/11/theres-no-place-like-127001/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/11/theres-no-place-li...

convolvatron 6y ago
you've struck upon an excellent idea. if we just make the units even less sensible then they are now, then no one will be even tempted to do the arithmetic
fmajid 6y ago
Well, I stopped buying Haagen-Dazs when their tubs shrank and stuck to Ben & Jerry instead. And I stopped buying Tropicana Orange Juice when they shrank their juice containers from 64 fl. oz. to 59. You can't fool all of the people all the time.
im3w1l 6y ago
I see that as a story about how subjective comparisons are non-transitive, i.e. x > y > z > x.

diego_moita 6y ago

I make my own yogurt, my own ice-cream and maintain a wild-yeast culture for making sourdough. I roast my coffee in a popcorn popper for espresso. I make my own cookies, cakes, spice mixes, jam from raspberries on the back-yard and even some cleaning products. Sometimes I churn my butter. But, still, found this article disturbing. I can't make my own toilet paper, milk or cream (for the ice-cream). We need some more creative destruction on the economy.

chrisseaton 6y ago

I don't understand what the problem is. Either the value makes sense to you at the point of purchase or it doesn't. What does it matter to anyone what it used to cost yesterday? This isn't yesterday and you aren't being offered the product at yesterday's price, so forget about what happened yesterday. Take the current price or leave it. The article talks about 'sneakiness'. I don't get it. Are they lying about the volume or weight of the product? No? So what on earth is the problem? Sometimes prices go up, sometimes they go down. It's not some secret conspiracy. Prices fluctuate, world markets and supply conditions change, labour prices change. Does he think it's the job of a manufacturer of ice cream to protect him from the sands of time? And for some of the examples in the article... do people really need larger servings of 'fruit loops' of all things? Come on.

yowlingcat 6y ago
> I don't understand what the problem is. Is it that you don't understand what the problem is, or that it makes you uncomfortable to look at the problem? Let me phrase a few questions that help me think about what I think the problem is in a few ways: - Do you think it's necessary or unnecessary for American regulations on advertising to exist? - Do you think it ought to be punished for products to be packaged in a deceptive manner as long as it's theoretically possible to see the base information to make a determination about the product? - Do you think that manufacturers that sell high purity goods can survive against those that diluted purity goods loaded with adulterants while concealing that and winning marketshare on volume?
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I agree with advertising regulations. I don't think any situation described in this article is deceptive. I think it's up to the consumer to pick purity that meets their needs. I'm not really sure how pure 'fruit loops' can be though so I'm not sure that's relevant here. In summary, there's no moral issue here. The price by weight or volume of every product is accessible to the consumer, and they can judge the quality of the product on their own. And anyway a half gallon of ice cream is an absolutely obscene quantity, and it's a good thing producers are packaging things in more reasonable sizes.

racecar789 6y ago

Given enough time, customers will eventually exit the market. Ex: I have completely stopped buying processed cereal (Cheerios etc) in favor of natural oatmeal. I have a 40lb bag of oatmeal at home that will last 4 months. Also much healthier. When I see tiny cereal boxes on a store shelf...I shake my head.

dariosalvi78 6y ago

I never read the price per unit, I always read the price per liter, kg etc. and use that to compare products.

thomasahle 6y ago
That's good, and those should be made very visible by law. However if a product you regularly buy suddently shrinks very slightly, you might not notice, since you are no longer comparing it to other things.
tpmx 6y ago
I do the same. I'm in Sweden. There's old school pre-EU-legislation for price labels to have show a comparison price like that here. I've always assumed this came out of the consumer-empowerment-movement in the 70s, here. Is there a similar thing in the rest of the EU? Perhaps this is left to the member countries?

prpl 6y ago

The ultimate example of this is dollar stores like Dollar General.

thomasahle 6y ago
I feel like it's pretty fair in thst case. By definition they can't raise prices, so how else are they to keep up with inflation?

noir_lord 6y ago

When I lived alone I ate a lot of convenience food and pre-made sauces and such, then I moved in with my partner and she cooks everything from scratch (she's same age as me and Hungarian so she grew up under communism-lite where having your own animals and veg/fruit gardens was common if you lived in the country). Honestly I'd forgotten how good basic food tastes when it's cooked fresh - she makes simple things like mashed potato amazing and she bakes a lot as well - she wastes no food, left-overs are used up as lunch or frozen. The really stupid part of all this from my point of view was that our combined food bill from raw ingredients is about the same as what I was paying living alone.

carapace 6y ago
My sister got a whole chicken from the butcher and roasted it. I tasted a bit and went into a fugue, when I came to I found I had made a chicken sandwich! I used to think I didn't like chicken but it turns out I'd just never tasted it before.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  My partner can get 3 meals for 3 of us out of a single chicken. She also buys the 'cheaper' parts like Chicken thighs and then slow cooks them to utter perfection, with a few herbs and veggies it is sublime. I honestly though since I 'cooked' I was been economical but things like spaghetti bolognaise jars of sauce added 30% to the cost of a meal compared to the way she does it.
  - carapace 6y ago
    Riiiiight? It's cheaper and tastier and I'm sure it's healthier. > She also buys the 'cheaper' parts like Chicken thighs and then slow cooks them to utter perfection, with a few herbs and veggies it is sublime. That sounds so good. :-)

carapace 6y ago

I still remember when 12 oz cans became 11.5 oz cans.

flyGuyOnTheSly 6y ago

My favorite example of this in Canada is a brand of butter that is shaped/looks exactly like a standard pound of butter when it sits on the shelf... but when you pick it up it's actually half a pound of butter... as it's only half as thick as you would expect it to be. It's usually priced higher than your average stick of butter as well. I picked one up once, laughed, and have actively avoided looking at that brand ever since. It's been on the shelf for years now though so they must be making good money?

crocodiletears 6y ago

I wonder if this shrinkage skews cost of living indices to any relevant degree. Changes to individual products may not amount to much money lost, but I could see them adding up in a non-trivial way that flies under the radar for most researchers.

Brian_K_White 6y ago

I always thought cake pops were the ultimate expression of this idea about the smaller dessert. Here is a single bite of cake. (They sell them at Starbucks, I don't know how much of a thing they are anywhere else. Actually I just realized I see the same idea in several restaurants with fancy little desserys in shot glasses. Still $6.50 for that one or two bites though.

pengaru 6y ago

This isn't a remotely recent phenomena. Back in the 90s when I was studying computer graphics I checked out a textbook on statistics and data visualization from the local library. I don't remember the year it was published, but it was one of those old hardcover books with browning coarse paper pages and a dark linen lining on the exterior. It was full of real world, hand-drawn visualizations, and one of the economic examples plotted Hersheys chocolate bar size per year across over a decade, with some other economic factor, GDP or some such. The text went a bit off on a tangent describing how the price of the bar stayed relatively constant but its volume varied in lockstep with the economy. I doubt you could use the Hersheys bar today as an economic barometer since we have so much variety on the store shelves. Back then there was just one Hersheys bar... but they seem to have always manipulated its size over its price.

lazylizard 6y ago

And yet my bmi keeps going up...perhaps they need to downsize some more...